In War Times (42 page)

“Empathy is measurable? Maybe the only people who decide to take it are the ones who are already more empathic,” suggested Sam. “Those who aren’t often treasure their lack of empathy. For instance, has Zee taken it?”

“Wouldn’t know. Might smooth his rough edges, though.”

“I always got the distinct impression he liked them. You’ve taken it?”

“Sure. Gives you a new emotional perspective. Hard to come by in any other way. People don’t usually take it very often because the experience is hard to assimilate. Mostly, those who indiscriminately take it are kids, but—”

“By kids, you mean?”

“Teenagers. Sixteen or so through maybe twenty-five.”

“The age most of us were when we were fighting the war.”

“Brains still growing. Anyway, Hadntz specifically got the Nobel for tracing the hormonal processes that keep the brain growing, as it were, and figured out how to replicate those states in us old, stupid adults. Keeps the brain in learning mode. If you want to learn a foreign language, a branch of mathematics—”

“Which a lot of people do, of course.” He tried to imagine Wild Card Zee having such aspirations, and failed.

“More than you might imagine.”

“I don’t suppose people have to work in your timestream.”

“Of course they do. And most people actually want to. Their work is emotionally satisfying because most of the deadly dull boring work is taken care of by machines.”

“Wow!” said Sam. “The technological dream of the early twentieth century has come true!”

“Be as sarcastic as you want. It’s true. The technologies of our two timestreams are diverging rapidly. I’ve been reading the newspapers. Here, you’re scrambling to catch up with Sputnik. There, ISES—the International Society for the Exploration of Space—is planning to put a team on the moon next year.”

“What? This must be jealousy I feel. At last.”

“It’s expensive to live on the moon. We can afford it. All your wealth, and the wealth of the Soviet Union and the countries they’re sucking dry—is still tied up in war. A cold war, no explosions, but a war nonetheless.”

“‘Your wealth,’” Sam mused. “Let’s just call your place Wink’s World. It’s a whole lot different than Sam’s World. Very shiny.” He sluiced condensation from his beer glass with one finger in the shape of a circle.

“Humans are definitely becoming different than what they’ve always been. We’re evolving—
consciously
. We can see a future in which criminality is greatly minimized. Where enhanced communication and science improve public health to the extent of diminishing the aging process. The war ravaged everyone. Now that there’s an alternative to war—”

“I’m just not sure what that alternative is, yet.”

“It’s not just one thing. It’s a lot of things.”

“Gee, is there anything bad in your world, bud?” Sam signaled for another beer.

“Sure. Unfortunately. Not everyone loves the way things are going and there is, of course, no ethical way to persuade them that things like curing diseases and exploring space and educating children and adults are good things. They can cause a lot of trouble in the good old-fashioned way—bombs, assassinations, and so forth. Sometimes it seems as if there’s going to be a real divide, a real breakdown in society based on whether people choose to grow with technology or impede its progress. The living world is unimaginably complex, and it’s true that we might make some sudden changes that turn out to be nonsustainable. We can’t know all the consequences of our actions. It’s a slow process. I’d be called a lunatic radical in a lot of quarters.”

“That’s kind of a relief. Tell me, who’s president?”

“Kennedy. Same here, I see.” Wink tapped a beer-rippled newspaper left on their table.

“Right. So. No worms in your political apple. No wars. No—”

“I didn’t say no wars. China is changing fast, and that kind of turmoil causes problems. A lot of postcolonial wars in Africa. Heartache aplenty, I’m afraid.”

“But for you the good news outweighs the bad.”

“Maybe that’s just from where I’m sitting. One step forward, two steps back. Sometimes I think that time has a shape, that it’s like a braid or something that weaves and overlaps and intersects at certain points, as it is for us right now.”

Sam nodded. “I think about the shape of time a lot. Maybe it’s like a piece of music. Diz and Bird. You remember that, don’t you? Two scales coming from different directions, sharing the same notes for a few beats, then diverging.”

“Seems like that’s what started it all, for me. A major jolt for my brain.”

“A form of ecstasy.”

“And a collaboration that depends on deep individuality. I think that Bird lived in several spacetimes at once.”

That night, Sam took the lysergic acid. Several hours later, they reopened the bar—just a matter of walking beneath the roof and turning on the power—and rifled through the bartender’s record stash. Some were old 78’s.

Sam held up a find. “‘Ornithology’! I’m going to recommend this bartender for a military commendation.”

They listened to it well over a dozen times, absorbing the astounding harmonic mind of Parker. Then Sam slowed it down to 33V3, and proceeded to lay his own saxophone over the notes. He’d heard it so many times—not just tonight—that it was already well lodged in his brain. But actually playing it, the kinetic experience, was learning on a much deeper level.

They turned off the record player then, and began to play, to move away from Parker’s vision into something completely new.

It began separately, each of them stating a slightly different theme. Then they wound the themes together.

It would have been difficult to say how they did so. It was a collaboration informed by the musical thoughts of each man. At times, one followed the other, and then the roles would reverse. Finally, they’d hammered out a completely new tune that had nothing to do with “Ornithology.”

“What shall we call that?” asked Wink.

“‘Timeocracy.’”

He and Wink talked through the night and wound up at dawn walking the beach past forbidding concrete bunkers from the war, looking for Japanese fishing floats. Everything that Sam saw set off a million instant associations, but mostly he felt a marvelous and transparent sense of well-being and happiness.

By midmorning he had slept, was back to normal, exhausted, and missing his kids tremendously. Because of them, and because of Bette, Sam was not at all envious of Wink’s world, his future, his enhanced horizons. If he were there, he would not have his children; he would not share his life with Bette. But then again he would not have wept for hours, as he had the night before, for the refugees of the world, those without homes and food, those caught in the political machinations of others. In Wink’s world, these problems were being slowly addressed and eradicated.

“Well, that was interesting,” Sam said, later in the day. “But I don’t consider it world-changing.”

“I didn’t say it was,” said Wink. “It’s just another tool your CIA is using to try to harm people, while we’re using it to help people. Context is everything.”

They’d come to no conclusions, made no concrete plans. Somehow just to see each other was enough; it solidified their sense of having a larger, shared purpose. And Wink could not stay longer than a day.

“Or you’ll turn into a pumpkin?” asked Sam.

“Oh. I almost forgot.” He took a small, flat case from his shirt pocket. “The HD10. You only have the HD4 here, right?”

Excited and disturbed at the same time, Sam opened the box. Inside was a thin card. He picked it up. It was smooth and slippery. “Plastic?”

“No. It’s a new, completely different material. All of the components of the original device are in there, but there have been a lot of augmentations. A lot of new information about the mind and how it functions.”

“It’s pretty small.”

“Molecular engineering. Everything is getting small.”

“I’m not sure I want this.”

Wink sighed. “Dance. We are affecting—influencing each other.”

“No kidding,” said Sam.

“Remember nonlocality? You’re the one who first told me about it.”

“I do.”

“This will retrofit the HD4.”

Sam shook his head. “I can’t go around and revisit all the ones I’ve put on these islands. The Navy won’t pay for it.”

“You don’t have to. This is already doing it for you. You don’t have to do anything.”

“How?”

“Using the principles of nonlocality.”

Sam regarded the small, thin device. “Maybe you should take it back where it came from. Maybe we’re doing just fine here. Look, I don’t want to be the one responsible for…whatever happens. I have kids, Wink. It’s going to be their world now. They’re going to have to live in the world that I—that all of us here—make for them.”

“Right,” said Wink. “All those H-bombs are good, right? The Berlin Wall? Russian gulags? Keep it.”

“And what can I, as the grateful colonial recipient of your world’s largesse, do for you?”

“It’s not like that. We’re in this together. Joined at the hip, so to speak. One can’t exist without the other. At some point, the balance will inevitably change. The smallest thing could change it. There’s something I want to tell you,” said Wink, almost as an afterthought, as the plane that would take him from Midway taxied toward them.

“What?”

“There’s a fellow doing some interesting work in physics. I’ve read his work, and I met him at a conference last year.”

“What’s his name?”

“Keenan Dance.”

Sam felt like giving Wink a bear hug and punching him at the same time. “Why didn’t you tell me!”

“I’m sorry. It’s…complicated. This Keenan has three sisters, and a brother who died in Europe during the war.”

“Huh.” Sam rubbed his jaw. “I see.”

Wink shrugged. “Just thought I ought to tell you.”

“Yeah. Well”—he tried to grin—“keep in touch.”

Their conversation stopped when the engines of the plane started up. The propellers doused them with hot wind. The door of the plane stood open.

Wink picked up his bag with one hand and with the other accepted the green fishing float he’d found on the beach the morning of their strange journey. They stood there a moment, knowing that they might never meet again, and then Wink turned and walked toward the plane.

During the next two weeks, as Sam did his inspections and prepared his reports, he went over to Sand Island to see if his Army buddies were there.

Zee’s ship had left the same morning that Wink had, and Kocab was on leave in the Philippines.

But his main job was to inspect the facilities there.

The Distant Early Warning mechanism looked like a giant golf ball on legs—that was the radom. It was linked to mammoth dishes, and a beacon tower reached into the sky.

Sam chatted with the radar ops guy in his room of sweep-arm screens and stacked-to-the-ceiling electronic components, then went through his fire safety check.

When he emerged from the radar hut, he walked to the foot of the huge antenna and opened his cigarette case.

When he saw the HD4, he felt a chill.

For the first time in years, it had changed. It was again clear, as it had been when they had first created it so long ago in Germany.

He took one of the sticks out of the case. It was still the same neutral temperature. He pressed it to one leg of the aluminum tower. As usual, it adhered firmly, forming a strong bond with pressure. He watched it for a few moments. It remained clear and flat for a moment, and then began developing the colored threads he’d seen in earlier versions.

He now knew exactly how Bette had felt when she felt Bette-of-Wartime returning.

When he was younger, he had welcomed change. Now, because of his children, he was not all that keen for it.

He tried to think of Keenan, Bette, his children as parts of a pattern, and failed.

The Nixon-Kennedy debates were on the television set. Sam cradled his quart-sized glass of iced tea in both hands and sat on a kitchen chair pulled up close to the set so as not to miss a word, while Brian and Megan romped behind him in the living room. Jill stood next to him.

“Do you want to be president?” she asked.

“No.”

She looked surprised.

Nixon was sweating. Kennedy was cool and in charge. Brilliant, with energy and verve and vision. A soldier, whereas Nixon was not.

He longed to tell her that there really were no heroes. Despite his own history, he never felt heroic or singled out. He was just another node of being, doing his best. How could any person, he wondered, have the audacity to take any action that might result in the deaths of others?

The Bay of Pigs fiasco was in the news. Bette was incensed at the way the CIA was used to attack the revolutionaries. “They’re
napalming
the sugarcane fields, Sam. Trying to destroy the crops of those poor people.”

“How do you know?”

“Unfortunately, I know.” She sighed. “They are creating a threat where there wasn’t really one. Castro kicked out the rich people. So what? It’s a socialist revolution, sure. But it’s really none of our business, in my opinion.”

“Didn’t he conduct a lot of purges? Kind of along the lines of Stalin?”

“Yes, but—”

“Your politics don’t seem to fit in with the professed intentions of your organization, honey.”

“You think I don’t know it? Kennedy’s an idiot for stirring this up. And it was bungled. That’s what happens when you use a pack of lies to justify an action.”

“Is that why Dulles has been fired?”

“He’s one of the scapegoats.”

Sam was surprised at Bette’s unusual candor in talking about these top-secret matters. “You must be really angry.”

“I am. I just don’t know what to do about it.”

Kennedy was setting up NATO schools all across Europe. As a result, Sam received a very good job offer in Oberammergau, Germany.

Bette refused to consider it at first. “No. It’s too close.”

“Too close to what?”

“To
me
, damn it!”

“To the war.”

“To Russia.”

“It’s a great job, Bette.”

“I can see that, Sam. It’s just that it’s in Europe. Germany.”